HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK
---------------------------
Mujahedeen used to live in this house in the village of
Bocinja. Those who took over homes illegally were evicted from the Serb
village, but some of their Bosnian followers still reside in several
houses they bought from the pre-war Serb residents. The house with
loudspeakers now serves as the village mosque.
Ivana Avramovic / S&S
A town sign greets entrants to the village of Bocinja in
Bosnia and Herzegovina where foreign Islamic fighters - Mujahedeen -
used to live.
In 1996, an investigative report by the Los Angeles Times
accused the Clinton administration of funneling money to buy weapons for
the Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
According to the Times, the plan was similar to one used by
the Reagan administration to fund the Contras in Nicaragua through Iran
in the Iran-Contra affair from 1983-88. It supposedly involved an effort
in 1994 to fund weapons assistance or to encourage other nations, namely
Iran, to break the international embargo on supply weapons to the
Bosnian Muslims through Croatia.
In a November 1996 report, the U.S. Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence concluded that there is no evidence that the
administration was involved in any such covert activity.
The committee did find that the Clinton administration knew
about the Third World Relief Agency - a Muslim organization that also
had ties to Osama bin Laden and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the radical
Egyptian cleric convicted of masterminding the first World Trade Center
bombing in 1993 - and its activities beginning in 1993.
The United States took no action to stop the organization's
fund-raising, transportation of fighters or arms purchases because of
the administration's sympathy for the Muslim government and ambivalence
about maintaining the arms embargo.
The Clinton administration didn't break any laws when it
adopted a "no instructions" policy or when it remained silent when
Croatian President Franjo Tudjman asked the U.S. for its view in 1994 on
Iran using the Third World Relief Agency to ship weapons through Croatia
to Bosnia, the Senate committee said.
The closest the administration came to breaking the law was
when Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who was then the director of Strategic Plans
and Policy on the Joint Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explored
options with Bosnian leaders about lifting the U.N. embargo, encouraging
greater third-party arms flows and the clandestine flow of
embargo-breaking arms, the committee said in its report.
Clark, who went on to become NATO's Supreme Allied Commander
Europe for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, told the committee he
had viewed the discussions as an exploration of overt policy options
because he had no authority to develop covert options.
The committee report said that while Clark told Bosnian
officials that he had no authority, his positive tone on covert
embargo-busting might have given those officials a stronger impression
than he intended.
While the administration eventually stopped enforcing the
embargo, it is "ludicrous" to think that it broke any laws, said Robert
Hunter, U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from
1993 to 1998.
- Gregory Piatt
Many of the foreign Muslim fighters who participated in the
1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina flowed into the region with U.S.
and NATO knowledge through an arms pipeline that evaded a U.N. embargo.
Now, the West is feeling the fallout of its attempts to help the
Bosnian Muslims in their fight. Some of the Mujahedeen, many who came
into Bosnia under the guise of working for an aid agency and stayed, are
believed to have contacts with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist
network, which sent fighters to the country and funded the pipeline.
"There was minimal concern among the allies [about the flow of
arms and Mujahedeen during the Bosnian war]," said Robert Hunter, U.S.
ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from 1993 to 1998
and now an analyst with the think tank Rand in Washington, D.C.
Some of the Mujahedeen, who fought and stayed after the war,
remain a threat to NATO peacekeepers - including 3,100 U.S. troops, CIA
Director George Tenet told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee last
month.
"U.S and other international forces are most at risk in Bosnia,
where Islamic extremists from outside the region played an important
role in the ethnic conflicts of the 1990s," Tenet said in his March 19
testimony. "There is considerable sympathy for international Islamic
causes among the Muslim community in Bosnia."
Much of this sympathy comes from local groups organized by some of
these fighters, which have indirect links to terrorist groups, a former
colonel with the Bosnian army's military intelligence unit told the
Stars and Stripes.
The colonel, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he
fears retaliation, said he was told to monitor the Mujahedeen during the
last years of the war. He said there were about 500 Mujahedeen who came
to help Bosnia from 1993 until the end of the war.
The colonel broke down the Mujahedeen into three types:
¶ Holy Warriors - those who came to die as "kamikazes" for the
Islamic cause.
¶ Criminals - those who "are not real Muslims but came to profit
from the war." This is the largest group that stayed in the country, and
many now "work or have worked for aid agencies and get paid a lot of
money." These Mujahedeen use "sweet words" to recruit local people to
extremist groups. It 's in this group that "the terrorists hide because
they are not real Muslims."
¶ Fundamentalists - this group is the "most dangerous for Bosnia
because they want to set up a fundamentalist state."
"Many people think that most of these fighters came from Iran,
Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey, but from what I saw, most came from Sudan,
Libya and Egypt," the colonel said. "Most of them were Sunni Muslims."
Bin Laden, who was living in Sudan at the time of the Bosnian war,
is a member of the Sunni sect of Islam and had a hand in bringing the
fighters into Bosnia along with funding the embargo-breaking arms
pipeline, wrote bin Laden expert Peter L. Bergen in "Holy War Inc.," a
book about the al-Qaida.
"A Vienna-based charity linked to bin Laden, Third World Relief
Agency, funneled millions of dollars in contributions to the Bosnians,"
wrote Bergen, who has interviewed bin Laden and is a CNN analyst.
"Al-Qaida trained Mujahedeen to go and fight in Bosnia during the
early '90s, and bin Laden's Services Office also maintained an office in
neighboring Croatia's capital, Zagreb."
The Mujahedeen came into Bosnia from Croatia, the colonel said.
"They came into Croatia at the ports of Split and Rijeka. Those were big
centers."
Along with the fighters, the arms pipeline came through Croatia
and was funded by Third World Relief Agency, the Washington Post
reported in a September 1996 story. The wartime Bosnian government
depended on the Third World Relief Agency, which obtained and paid for
weapons from Iran and other countries along with supplying fighters, the
Post reported.
With a U.N. arms embargo in place, the Bosnian Muslim government
was driven into alliances with some of the world's most radical states
that were then on a U.S. State Department watch list of countries that
support terrorism as well as terrorist movements, the Post story said.
Now, many of the Mujahedeen and weapons bought and shipped by
Third World Relief Agency remain in the Balkans. Peacekeepers in Bosnia
and Kosovo are faced with trying to locate these weapons and apprehend
the fighters.
Many of those weapons turned up in Kosovo in the late 1990s and
during last year's Albanian insurgency in Macedonia, Kosovo peacekeeping
force officials have said.
During his Senate testimony in March, Tenet said the Mujahedeen
who remain in Bosnia, aided by weak border controls, large amounts of
weapons and organized crime in the Balkans, pose an "ongoing threat to
U.S. forces there," as well as to the stability of the area.
---------------------------
ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST
==^================================================================
This email was sent to: [email protected]
EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9617B
Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail!
http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register
==^================================================================
